No. 1557

Sweetbreads a la la Valliere

Ris de Veau a la La Valliere

Prepare, cook, and glaze the sweetbreads the same as for those larded with gravy (No. 1575); dress them in a circle filling in the center with a garnishing of small mushroom heads stirred into a buttered allemande sauce (No. 407), adding to it lemon juice and chopped parsley; arrange outside the circle twelve small croustades, six of them filled with green peas, and the six others with soubise puree (No. 723). Lay on each croustade a slice of glazed truffle, and a small trussed and glazed crawfish between every one.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Delmonico's assembly recipe: the sweetbreads themselves are cooked elsewhere in the book, and what you see here is the plating. Read it as a diagram rather than a method, and work backwards through the cross-references before starting.

The hinge: soak, blanch, pressRanhofer assumes you already know the standard treatment. Veal sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water until no pink runs out, blanched briefly, refreshed in ice water, then peeled of membrane and pressed flat under a weighted plate for an hour or two in the refrigerator. Skip the pressing and they will not hold a slice or take a glaze.
"Glaze" is not sugarTo glaze here means to reduce the braising liquid to a syrupy meat glaze and brush it over the sweetbreads until they shine, repeatedly, in a hot oven or under gentle heat. The same applies to the truffle slices and the crawfish.
Allemande sauceNo. 407 is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison. It must not boil once the yolks go in or it will curdle, so keep it well below simmering. "Buttered" means finishing with butter off the heat at the last moment, which makes the sauce awkward to reheat.
Soubise pureeNo. 723 is an onion puree, onions sweated in butter without colouring and bound with rice or thick bechamel, then sieved. It should be stiff enough to sit proud in a croustade rather than run.
CroustadesIn this book a croustade is a small fried or baked bread or pastry case, not the modern shop-bought vol-au-vent. Twelve of them at roughly an inch and a half across is a fussy hour of work; small store-bought pastry shells are the honest substitute.
Crawfish"Trussed" means the tail bent under and skewered or tucked so the cooked crawfish curls neatly. Whole crawfish are seasonal and regional; whole cooked langoustines or large shell-on prawns give the same silhouette.
TruffleA slice of glazed truffle per croustade is twelve slices of fresh black truffle. Preserved truffle peelings will read as decoration but not much else; a thin slice of a large sauteed mushroom cap is the more sensible compromise.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of sweetbreads and no serving count; the twelve croustades are the only numerical guide. The dish is built as one round platter to be served at table rather than plated individually.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how a nineteenth-century grand kitchen worked: nothing is written out twice, and a dish is defined almost entirely by its garnish and its cross-references. The name points to Louise de La Valliere, mistress of Louis XIV, one of a long roster of French court figures whose names were attached to garnishes by nineteenth-century chefs -- the association is decorative rather than historical. Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas of a calf, were an expensive restaurant item at the time, prized for their mildness and pale colour and treated as a canvas for exactly this sort of ornament: a ring of glazed meat, an inner circle of sauced mushrooms, an outer ring of alternating pastry cases and shellfish. That symmetry was the point.